OK, I'm all for Linux advocacy and stuff, but this is just plain silly. First of all, while you *can* run 40,000 instances of Linux on one mainframe, it doesn't mean it will be very useful. If you take the processing power of a mainframe and divide it by 40,000, you'll see that each virtual Linux box is much slower than a 386. (Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem. Other than that, it's more or less an ordinary 12-CPU box.)
Secondly, a cluster of x86 boxes will be an order of magnitude cheaper than a cluster of mainframes with equal processing power. Note that a single mainframe will NOT be able to handle all of the load. Ever heard of Beowulf? The guys that built Avalon (a Beowulf cluster of Alpha boxes) claim that it was over 6 times cheaper than a supercomputer from SGI with comparable performance. ___
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. I don't know how their load balancing stuff is working, but I guess that NT box fails 20% of the time and a FreeBSD box takes over. In any case, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you need to query www.hotmail.com if you want to find out what www.hotmail.com is running.
lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>/var/tmp/hotmail
Dumbass! You need to query www.hotmail.com. Looks like the address you are querying is an NT box, so it's not surprising that you're getting these results. ___
uhm, yes. Old Athlons come in slot-A packaging (much like Intel's Slot-1). The new Athlons (Thunderbirds) and Durons come in socket-A packaging (much like the olde socket7 and *cough* soket 370, etc.)
Places where it definately is NOT wasted. - Gaming.
Not quite. Games are more than happy with current CPUs. Anything over 800MHz or so is really useless. At resolutions 1024x768 and above, the FPS of a game is limited by the video card. Just check out the benchmarks. At high resolutions any reasonably fast CPU is able to saturate the video card with data. I especially like the benchmark where Celeron 667 is compared to 1GHz Pentium (see either Tomshardware, or Anandtech). The 1GHz beast easily smokes Celeron by like 40-50% at 640x480. But the FPS numbers quickly start to converge as the resolution is increased. At 1024x768 1GHz Pentium is only slightly ahead of the Celeron, and at higher resolutions, there is essentially no difference at all. (BTW, the video card was GeForce 2 GTS, the fastest at the time).
As for running Win2k and Outlook... well, can't argue with that;-)
Even a complex game like Quake3 rarely pushes over 200MB/sec of bandwidth to RAM. That's one reason why RDRAM is often useless, because apps rarely push even the 800MB/sec of SDRAM.
Agreed. While the higher bandwidth of RDRAM helps a little, the higher latency slows things down a lot. That's one of the reasons I hope Rambus will die a horrible death. The sooner the better. ___
I don't know if it's just because I've got an older card or what, but it works fine in both win98 and Linux. (I used to run NT a while ago and it also worked fine). At work a few boxes have Xpert98 and it works fine as well. So I haven't experienced any driver problems. In fact I'd say ATI is the best card for low end. And now the Radeon is kicking some serious butt on the high end. And since they released the specs, I'd expect the Linux driver to appear fairly soon. ___
Can you write to DVD-RAM like to an HD? By that I mean, can you copy/delete files at will? Or do you need to write to it a track at a time, like CD-R, and delete the whole disk at once? ___
What the hell are you talking about? I just downloaded VPND source code and looked at it myself. Looks fine to me. Go troll somewhere else. I got it from the link below, btw.
Microsoft's "secure" PPTP protocol is inherently insecure, and hence no implementation of it can be secure.
I was wondering about this thing myself, so I did some reasearch. Basically, the situation is that there are Unix VPN servers/clients that implement IPSec protocol. IPSec is the industry standard for VPN. (read: it's secure). Microsoft did not want to go with the standard protocol (surprised?) and instead "innovated" PPTP. Well, PPTP is complete joke. It didn't take me long to find articles analyzing PPTP security. (I'm sure other/. readers will post links to them).
So anyway, there are PPTP servers for Linux, like PoPTop, and PPTP comes built into win9x/NT. You could certainly go with this solution, as it would be the easiest one. (PPTP is better than nothing, I guess). If you want real security though, the best thing to do is to put Linux VPN servers on both sides of the tunnel. This is not always possible though. If you have two or more offices that you want to connect, that's easy -- just put the VPN servers/firewalls in each of them. But if you have windows users with laptops, or people working from home, you'll have to resort to PPTP. Unless there is a free/cheap IPSec client for windows (which I am not aware of).
Can somebody give me a reason *why* Sun would want to do that? Sun is almost as bad as Microsoft (I say almost only because Sun actually does make some good products and doesn't go out of their way to break interoperability with non-Sun software). But seriously, this is the last thing I would expect from Sun, especially given all the stink about them not wanting to make Java an open standard.
Oh, and I agree with danheskett that StarOffice sucks. Even MS Office is better.
On a side note, how is KOffice doing? I heard it was coming along pretty nicely and will be shipped at the same time as KDE2. Can anyone clue me in?
You've never tried it yourself have you? My university is running exactly this setup and it works perfectly. Yes, netscape runs just fine remotely. There's no Applix or WordPerfect, but you can use MS Office 97 that runs over wincenter and it also runs just fine. Come back after you've seen this kind of thing in action. X was designed for network. The ability to run X apps remotely is there for a reason. ___
I'm not in favor of remote execution of applications. For reasons I stated later, running X over a LAN isn't a scalable choice.
Actually, it is. My university is running 5 labs of diskless X terminals (20 - 30 terminals in each) over an unswitched half-duplex 10BaseT and it works great. Don't forget that X was designed for network. Why not use this feature then? ___
I absolutely agree with the above comment. And I just want to point out a few more excellent points of this setup:
1. CPU power and memory requirements keep increasing year after year, forcing you to upgrade stand-alone PCs. In the case of terminals, however, they are used only for running the X server. All the applications would run remotely. Therefore, it would be irrelevant if the terminal is P-100 or a P3-1000 -- all it's used for is *display* of data. You would need to upgrade the terminals *only* if you decide that they need more video memory/faster video acceleration or something. And in general, since a terminal does no work wrt running applications, it is not subject to the usual upgrade cycle of stand-alone PCs and, therefore, can last *much* longer.
2. It is *much* more efficient to run applications on a single server than on a whole buch of stand-alone PCs. First of all, 99% of the time a stnad-alone PC is idle. How much CPU work does it take to type in a letter in Word or read a web page in Netscape? Since a single application server would run all the apps for a fairly large group of terminals, the CPU time would be used much more efficiently. Therefore, even a not-so-fast server would be able to easily serve a few dozen terminals. Further, how many people in the office would be running exactly the same apps? Say, 20 people are running netscape at the same time. On stand-alone PCs, each would need to have a copy of Netscape code in memory. On an app server, only *one* copy would be required for all 20 users, thanks to the shared memory. So, an app server is also more memory-efficient as well as CPU-efficient.
3. Windows apps. Yes, people need to run them too. (like Word for instance). You can set up a couple of NT servers to run wincenter or something. Then, the terminal users can run windows apps in almost the same way as remote X apps (windows apps appear inside a separate window that looks like a NT desktop window)
4. Another poster has already explained the virtues of storing all user data remotely on file servers, so I'm not gonna go into details
5. Upgrades. I already said why hardware upgrades would need to be very rare. Same with software. The terminals would run a very minimalist installation of Linux with all daemons off except for the X server. So you would neet to worry only about upgrading the servers. It sure is easier to upgrade a few dozen servers than 2500 individual workstations.
I could go on, but that should be enough to give you the idea. Just to let you know I'm not speaking out of my ass, my university (www.uwaterloo.ca) is using exactly the same setup, except the terminals also boot remotely (via bootp). It works very nicely. Only problem is that this being a cash-strapped university, the terminals have really crappy video cards in them, and really crapy monitors. Oh well. ___
DirectX is a proprietary windows-only API built on top of COM and win32. It is impossible to port a game to another platform if it's written for DirectX. That alone prevents it from making a splash on Linux platform. On top of that, DirectX totally sucked until about version 6. ___
Multiple inheritance - there are very few cases where MI is actually usefull. In most cases where you have a MI based object model, you'll probably find if you look closely that it shouldn't be MI in the first place, but rather embedded objects.
bull shit. I have worked on projects where MI is extremely useful. Replacing it with embedded objects would be extremely ugly.
Templates - It is unlikely this will ever be included in Delphi for the simple reason of compilation speed. Anyone who's ever compared compilation speed of comparable projects between Delphi and C++ will notice how much longer C++ takes.
Now this is a completely clueless statement. You are saying that a language should not include an extremely useful feature just because of increased compilation speed? Good one! ___
And what's the point of that? If you only want to store COMPARABLE and its descendants you don't need templates. You can just write the class for COMPARABLE.
To parafrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are benchmarks. Seriously though, what do they have to say now? It's especially interesing that Dell did both benchmarks. I would expect Dell to be Microsoft-biased. Especially since they, just like Mindcraft last year, used a system with 4 network cards. (for those who don't know, this is precisely why NT had won, and Mindcraft refused to do tests with only 1 network card). ___
Slashdot Mirror
The screenshot looks identical to bochs. Is this the same project or did they fork from it? Also, how is it different from dosemu?
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no! from www.hotmail.com you get redirected to one of the servers. He scanned just one address, which is handled by mostly NT boxes.
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OK, I'm all for Linux advocacy and stuff, but this is just plain silly. First of all, while you *can* run 40,000 instances of Linux on one mainframe, it doesn't mean it will be very useful. If you take the processing power of a mainframe and divide it by 40,000, you'll see that each virtual Linux box is much slower than a 386. (Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem. Other than that, it's more or less an ordinary 12-CPU box.)
Secondly, a cluster of x86 boxes will be an order of magnitude cheaper than a cluster of mainframes with equal processing power. Note that a single mainframe will NOT be able to handle all of the load. Ever heard of Beowulf? The guys that built Avalon (a Beowulf cluster of Alpha boxes) claim that it was over 6 times cheaper than a supercomputer from SGI with comparable performance.
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Yeah, I was wondering about that too. I don't know how their load balancing stuff is working, but I guess that NT box fails 20% of the time and a FreeBSD box takes over. In any case, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you need to query www.hotmail.com if you want to find out what www.hotmail.com is running.
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Dumbass! You need to query www.hotmail.com. Looks like the address you are querying is an NT box, so it's not surprising that you're getting these results.
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Bugs come from open windows.
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uhm, yes. Old Athlons come in slot-A packaging (much like Intel's Slot-1). The new Athlons (Thunderbirds) and Durons come in socket-A packaging (much like the olde socket7 and *cough* soket 370, etc.)
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subject says it all.
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- Gaming.
Not quite. Games are more than happy with current CPUs. Anything over 800MHz or so is really useless. At resolutions 1024x768 and above, the FPS of a game is limited by the video card. Just check out the benchmarks. At high resolutions any reasonably fast CPU is able to saturate the video card with data. I especially like the benchmark where Celeron 667 is compared to 1GHz Pentium (see either Tomshardware, or Anandtech). The 1GHz beast easily smokes Celeron by like 40-50% at 640x480. But the FPS numbers quickly start to converge as the resolution is increased. At 1024x768 1GHz Pentium is only slightly ahead of the Celeron, and at higher resolutions, there is essentially no difference at all. (BTW, the video card was GeForce 2 GTS, the fastest at the time).
As for running Win2k and Outlook... well, can't argue with that ;-)
Even a complex game like Quake3 rarely pushes over 200MB/sec of bandwidth to RAM. That's one reason why RDRAM is often useless, because apps rarely push even the 800MB/sec of SDRAM.
Agreed. While the higher bandwidth of RDRAM helps a little, the higher latency slows things down a lot. That's one of the reasons I hope Rambus will die a horrible death. The sooner the better.
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I don't know if it's just because I've got an older card or what, but it works fine in both win98 and Linux. (I used to run NT a while ago and it also worked fine). At work a few boxes have Xpert98 and it works fine as well. So I haven't experienced any driver problems. In fact I'd say ATI is the best card for low end. And now the Radeon is kicking some serious butt on the high end. And since they released the specs, I'd expect the Linux driver to appear fairly soon.
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Can you write to DVD-RAM like to an HD? By that I mean, can you copy/delete files at will? Or do you need to write to it a track at a time, like CD-R, and delete the whole disk at once?
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You know where I can get one?
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What the hell are you talking about? I just downloaded VPND source code and looked at it myself. Looks fine to me. Go troll somewhere else. I got it from the link below, btw.
http://sunsite.auc.dk/vpnd/
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Microsoft's "secure" PPTP protocol is inherently insecure, and hence no implementation of it can be secure.
/. readers will post links to them).
I was wondering about this thing myself, so I did some reasearch. Basically, the situation is that there are Unix VPN servers/clients that implement IPSec protocol. IPSec is the industry standard for VPN. (read: it's secure). Microsoft did not want to go with the standard protocol (surprised?) and instead "innovated" PPTP. Well, PPTP is complete joke. It didn't take me long to find articles analyzing PPTP security. (I'm sure other
So anyway, there are PPTP servers for Linux, like PoPTop, and PPTP comes built into win9x/NT. You could certainly go with this solution, as it would be the easiest one. (PPTP is better than nothing, I guess). If you want real security though, the best thing to do is to put Linux VPN servers on both sides of the tunnel. This is not always possible though. If you have two or more offices that you want to connect, that's easy -- just put the VPN servers/firewalls in each of them. But if you have windows users with laptops, or people working from home, you'll have to resort to PPTP. Unless there is a free/cheap IPSec client for windows (which I am not aware of).
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Or perhaps if they made their products better and cheaper. Do you know how much Office costs? $800. Is it worth the money? nope!
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Can somebody give me a reason *why* Sun would want to do that? Sun is almost as bad as Microsoft (I say almost only because Sun actually does make some good products and doesn't go out of their way to break interoperability with non-Sun software). But seriously, this is the last thing I would expect from Sun, especially given all the stink about them not wanting to make Java an open standard.
Oh, and I agree with danheskett that StarOffice sucks. Even MS Office is better.
On a side note, how is KOffice doing? I heard it was coming along pretty nicely and will be shipped at the same time as KDE2. Can anyone clue me in?
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You've never tried it yourself have you? My university is running exactly this setup and it works perfectly. Yes, netscape runs just fine remotely. There's no Applix or WordPerfect, but you can use MS Office 97 that runs over wincenter and it also runs just fine. Come back after you've seen this kind of thing in action. X was designed for network. The ability to run X apps remotely is there for a reason.
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uhhm, no. I'm in third year. Go away troll.
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Actually, it is. My university is running 5 labs of diskless X terminals (20 - 30 terminals in each) over an unswitched half-duplex 10BaseT and it works great. Don't forget that X was designed for network. Why not use this feature then?
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I absolutely agree with the above comment. And I just want to point out a few more excellent points of this setup:
1. CPU power and memory requirements keep increasing year after year, forcing you to upgrade stand-alone PCs. In the case of terminals, however, they are used only for running the X server. All the applications would run remotely. Therefore, it would be irrelevant if the terminal is P-100 or a P3-1000 -- all it's used for is *display* of data. You would need to upgrade the terminals *only* if you decide that they need more video memory/faster video acceleration or something. And in general, since a terminal does no work wrt running applications, it is not subject to the usual upgrade cycle of stand-alone PCs and, therefore, can last *much* longer.
2. It is *much* more efficient to run applications on a single server than on a whole buch of stand-alone PCs. First of all, 99% of the time a stnad-alone PC is idle. How much CPU work does it take to type in a letter in Word or read a web page in Netscape? Since a single application server would run all the apps for a fairly large group of terminals, the CPU time would be used much more efficiently. Therefore, even a not-so-fast server would be able to easily serve a few dozen terminals. Further, how many people in the office would be running exactly the same apps? Say, 20 people are running netscape at the same time. On stand-alone PCs, each would need to have a copy of Netscape code in memory. On an app server, only *one* copy would be required for all 20 users, thanks to the shared memory. So, an app server is also more memory-efficient as well as CPU-efficient.
3. Windows apps. Yes, people need to run them too. (like Word for instance). You can set up a couple of NT servers to run wincenter or something. Then, the terminal users can run windows apps in almost the same way as remote X apps (windows apps appear inside a separate window that looks like a NT desktop window)
4. Another poster has already explained the virtues of storing all user data remotely on file servers, so I'm not gonna go into details
5. Upgrades. I already said why hardware upgrades would need to be very rare. Same with software. The terminals would run a very minimalist installation of Linux with all daemons off except for the X server. So you would neet to worry only about upgrading the servers. It sure is easier to upgrade a few dozen servers than 2500 individual workstations.
I could go on, but that should be enough to give you the idea. Just to let you know I'm not speaking out of my ass, my university (www.uwaterloo.ca) is using exactly the same setup, except the terminals also boot remotely (via bootp). It works very nicely. Only problem is that this being a cash-strapped university, the terminals have really crappy video cards in them, and really crapy monitors. Oh well.
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DirectX is a proprietary windows-only API built on top of COM and win32. It is impossible to port a game to another platform if it's written for DirectX. That alone prevents it from making a splash on Linux platform. On top of that, DirectX totally sucked until about version 6.
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bull shit. I have worked on projects where MI is extremely useful. Replacing it with embedded objects would be extremely ugly.
Templates - It is unlikely this will ever be included in Delphi for the simple reason of compilation speed. Anyone who's ever compared compilation speed of comparable projects between Delphi and C++ will notice how much longer C++ takes.
Now this is a completely clueless statement. You are saying that a language should not include an extremely useful feature just because of increased compilation speed? Good one!
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And what's the point of that? If you only want to store COMPARABLE and its descendants you don't need templates. You can just write the class for COMPARABLE.
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it's called ssh
'nuff said
oh, btw, I do not know whether to be amused or alarmed by the win32 comment.
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To parafrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are benchmarks. Seriously though, what do they have to say now? It's especially interesing that Dell did both benchmarks. I would expect Dell to be Microsoft-biased. Especially since they, just like Mindcraft last year, used a system with 4 network cards. (for those who don't know, this is precisely why NT had won, and Mindcraft refused to do tests with only 1 network card).
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